The Impact of Covid-19: A Large Percentage of Over-50s Who Left Jobs Now Living in Poverty, Reveals Think-Tank
- Nearly half of 50- to 70-year-olds who left employment in 2020-21 are now considered to be in relative poverty
- The Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that individuals were forced into early retirement as a result of the pandemic
The findings reveal that a significant proportion of older individuals who left the workforce during the Covid-19 pandemic are currently facing financial struggles.
According to new analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) think-tank, 48% of 50- to 70-year-olds who resigned from their jobs in 2020-21 have now fallen into a state of relative poverty.
This figure is substantially higher compared to the proportion of individuals who voluntarily left their jobs pre-pandemic, suggesting that many older individuals were forced into early retirement due to the effects of lockdown measures and health risks.
The results of this research place additional pressure on Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to develop successful strategies to reintegrate a large number of over-50s into the workforce. Hunt’s proposed initiatives, such as midlife MOTs and apprenticeships for career transitions, aim to address this issue.
Official figures show that there was a significant rise of 280,000 individuals, totaling 3.5 million, aged between 50 and 64 years old who were unemployed and not seeking new employment between November of the previous year to January, which was an increase compared to the same period three years prior to the pandemic.
New analysis has found that 48 per cent of the 50- to 70-year-olds who left employment in 2020-21 ended up in relative poverty (file photo)
It will put extra pressure on Chancellor Jeremy Hunt (pictured outside No10) to succeed in his attempts to get large numbers of over-50s back to work by offering them so-called midlife MOTs and apprenticeships for new careers
Xiaowei Xu, a senior research economist at the IFS, stated, “It is often assumed that older people who left the workforce during the pandemic were wealthy individuals retiring in comfort.
Our analysis shows that those who left in the first year of the pandemic experienced a sharp rise in poverty, despite overall poverty rates falling that year, and also suffered large declines in well-being.
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